f. Let’s Start Cooking Now

If you enjoy eating and enjoy eating consciously, appreciating encounters with new flavors or meeting again with cherished, known flavors, like old friends, you are ready to cook for fun.

Practicing is the only way to learn more and to get to know your products better, as you try out this or that recipe, correct that technique, figure out what you like yourself and what you would like to share with others.

Cooking is modular, linked, repetitive, adaptive. For example, Alexandre’s tomato sauce can be considered a building block, usable for a soup, pasta or Parmigiana eggplant. If you want to make it without celery but with basil instead, just do it. You do not require another recipe.

Taste changes with age because we tire of this or that flavor or because our body tells us it needs something else.

Your cooking techniques may also change. You may start barbecuing a lot, and at one point use steaming more and more. The more techniques you use, the more you will know about the physical and chemical processes that transform raw ingredients into happy combinations, and about which method you should apply to get the end flavor you are looking for.

Personally, because of the demands of professional life on my time, I came to favor short cooking times at high heat. I tweaked the recipes I found here and there to fit this approach, and in turn, I came to prefer the resulting fresher flavor over longer cooking methods.

This became my preferred style of cooking, but now, with more time available, I am evolving. I often opt for slower ways and I have started fantasizing seriously about the large, welcoming fireplace I will have some day for truly Paleolithic cooking adventures. (1)

I now wish to share with you my love of ingredients and some of the dishes I routinely prepare. As you go through them, maybe they will trigger some reactions and accompany you for a while on your own lifetime quest for meaningful cooking.

 

 

(1)   Of course, this has nothing to do with the new Paleolithic diet fad which I will not comment about, not having lived in these ancient times and gathered meaningful first-hand experience to share with you.